Transcription
If I was Trump's daughter, he's, you know, he's probably doing me some good, you know. And he might, I might, weirdly, you know, I might love him.
What would be your prescription for how to begin to sort of pull, you know, extract yourself, de-mess yourself from that?
Yeah, well, that's a difficult hypothetical question because we don't know about the psychological makeup of, in this case, the daughter you're referring to, right? But if the person, if the narcissistic individual isn't suffering in some way, there's no way to successfully intervene because any intervention you would offer would create suffering if they accepted it. An uninvited interpretation is an aggression.
One of the things we observe as clinicians is that somebody with a very severe narcissistic personality disorder is just on the edge of psychosis. What they believe seems so far removed from reality that it's almost a breakdown in reality testing, but not quite, because they managed to maintain enough of a coherent system to function in the world. Now, if that individual is causing us harm, I think we're better off not interpreting to them, but just trying to change the reality around them.
This is actually analogous to what we do sometimes in clinical situations. When we have, I'm thinking of a case of a young adult who had this kind of malignant narcissism, seemed to get pleasure in causing pain to others, was totally refractory to any therapy efforts. After one has exhausted one's efforts to do individual therapy, our advice to our students is give up on the individual therapy. Work with the system. Help, in this case, the family understand that they can't, for whatever reason, and we can't seem to make a dent in the individual psychological function. But if you change the conditions of their life, if you stop supporting them so generously so that it just seems to facilitate their bad behavior, if you put up a structure to contain them.
So in the example you're giving, I don't think there's any interventions that could change the individual psychology. I think the structure, and that's what we're all working toward, to try and create a government that contains instead of sort of cooperates with pathology.